In association with LUX, we are delighted to present a screening of the new artists’ commissions from our upcoming 2020 national film tour exploring the legacy, methods, aesthetic strategies and histories of the UK’s Black Film Workshop Movement that developed throughout the 1980s.
Our tour comprises archive films from the period – Martina Attille’s Dreaming Rivers, Milton Bryan’s The People’s Account and D. Elmina Davis’ Omega Rising Women of Rastafari – and at this event, we will screen the new artists’ moving image shorts we commissioned in response to the Movement; by artist filmmakers Ayo Akingbade, B.O.S.S. collective, Morgan Quaintance and Rehana Zaman.
Films in the programme
Claudette’s Star
Dir: Ayo Akingbade | UK | 2019 | 6 mins
Acting as part ode and through a series of interpretations, the film depicts young artists considering with sheer wonder who is given a voice.
Directed, produced and edited by Ayo Akingbade
Collective Hum
Dir: B.O.S.S. Collective | UK | 2019 | 7 mins
A short film exploring the polyphony of collectivity in the desires, motivations and stories that foreground the histories and present(s) of Black British sound. Collective Hum documents a collective in practice through the operation of B.O.S.S using multiple narration, overlapping voices and the sound of group interviews, meetings and events to create a polyphonic score to soundtrack images of the ‘collective bodies, kinaesthetic experience and gestural language’ of sound system culture.
South
Dir: Morgan Quaintance | UK | 2019 | 28 mins
What kind of power is accessible through the discovery of a voice? Looking at personal and communal empowerment through vocal training and liberation movements in London and Chicago, South also explores what happens when speech is ignored, and the voice fades.
Camera/edit/sound/writing: Morgan Quaintance
Your Ecstatic Self
Dir: Rehana Zaman | UK | 2019 | 32 mins
Your Ecstatic Self is a conversation unfolding in a car with Sajid, the artist’s brother. As the journey progresses Sajid discusses his engagement with the philosophy and practice of Tantra, having spent the majority of his 44 years as a strict Sunni Pakistani Muslim. Placing the idiosyncrasies of western fetishism towards eastern philosophical traditions alongside cultural orthodoxies and ancestral knowledge, Your Ecstatic Self takes up multifaceted expressions of desire, intimacy and sexual agency.
